by Kieran Shea
“No one but me meets this inbound, understand? That’s a direct order.”
Flight responds. “Um, roger that. But shouldn’t we advise recycle retrieval? We can have four hangar tanks on the pad out there, no problem.”
“No. Extinguish all meet orders.”
“They’re going to squawk.”
“Just do it,” Delacompte says. “No one meets this inbound without my authorization. This is a disciplinary issue for CPB and SI executive management, and I am handling the matter personally.”
Delacompte terminates the ATC patch transmission. She rubs her forehead and then stalks over to her office credenza.
When she presses a button recessed into the paneling at hip-level, the top of the credenza rolls back and the crystal water pitcher and glasses that sat there—flecked with Lee’s blood—crash to the floor. Delacompte gently steps into the spilt water and broken glass.
Letting her fingertips graze from piece to piece, she looks down and drinks in a neat display of guns and close-quarter ammunitions. The weapons are organized from the smallest to the largest. With one hand she picks up a bandolier of pulse grenades, and with her other hand she lifts up the compact stock of an Italian prototype pulse rifle.
“Time to accessorize,” she says.
Delacompte gears up.
FLIGHT TO FIGHT
The chopped down co-pilot and helmsman Hoon groggily comes to, and Flynn lifts and leads her by the elbow to the co-pilot’s seat. Like a slug stretched beneath the skin, a neat purple bruise the length of Koko’s hand creases the young woman’s neck. She sniffles and stammers a stream of terrified whats and whys—wanting to know what has happened, why they are flying, why they appear to be off course—but Jot gives her an order to be quiet and the girl clams up. Meanwhile, in the rear of the cabin, Flynn studies Koko as she sets both the Sig and his Beretta to the guns’ most powerful discharge settings.
“I don’t get it,” Flynn says. “I mean, the entire world and the Second Free Zone. The whole planet to choose from. Why would you go back to the one place where you know someone is looking to kill you? You could go anywhere, Koko. Anywhere.”
Koko seats both guns on her belt, draws, and snugs them back home again. “I know,” she replies.
“I’m serious. This is totally nuts.”
“You don’t get it,” she says.
“You’re right,” Flynn answers angrily. “I don’t get it. I’m just some pathetic loser who helped save your life and got a bunch of people killed.”
Koko reaches out and pats his arm. “And I thank you for that. Really. Not for getting people killed, but you know what I mean. Look, Flynn, you have to understand. This is who I am. This is how I’ve always dealt with things, or how I used to deal with things, anyway. Me? Be hounded? What, I get to look over my shoulder every day in some far-flung piece of bankrupt supersprawl until someone sells me out and plants a knife in my neck? Uh-uh, no way. I am not signing up for that. Portia Delacompte sent those bounty agents after me up top when the Second Free Zone is supposedly off limits. Just how long do you think I’d survive on Earth with a price on my head? And Portia Delacompte? Ha. Even if she’s painted her actions as some kind of CPB public-relations mop-up or me as a loony SI vendor gone rogue, she won’t stop, Flynn. Not ever. Not when I know her secret and I’m still alive.”
“Yeah,” Flynn says, “her big secret. You weren’t exactly clear on that back on Alaungpaya. What the hell is all this about anyway? I’m thinking it’s got to be something pretty heinous for her to risk unleashing those killers. God, there must have been close to a hundred people milling about the terminal when that pulse grenade went off.”
“Maybe it’ll be safer for you if you didn’t know.”
“Safer for me? What, you want me just to move on and forget? Those were innocent people, Koko. Innocent civilians going about their lives. You think their lives don’t matter? You know what? Fuck you, Koko. Fuck you. The last time I checked, I’m more than an accomplice here. I think I deserve to know the details of this big, bad Delacompte secret at this point. And anyway, you’ve said it yourself. Me, I’m a dead man. You owe me the consideration.”
Koko looks down at her feet. She takes a few calming breaths before she finally looks up into Flynn’s eyes. She allows another beat to pass between them before she lifts her chin and addresses Jot and Hoon.
“Hey,” Koko says. “You two wingers have headsets?”
Jot and Hoon shake their heads no.
“Stick your fingers in your ears, then.”
Reluctantly, Jot engages the frigate’s autopilot system, and the ship quivers from side to side. Jot and Hoon push their fingers into their ears, and Koko edges closer to speak softly to Flynn.
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE (AND THEN SOME)
The years since Delacompte left the mercenary life to pursue her schooling and business aspirations hadn’t exactly been a cakewalk for Koko.
One might say Koko’s once unshakable commitment to anonymously mucking out the stalls on international re-civ stability efforts and buttressing syndicate bottom lines as an expendable asset had reached a critical juncture. That is, she was one more screwed-up assignment or disciplinary action away from burning out altogether.
Finishing up a tedious hitch on the Venezuela mining plateaus for the SA Mineral Corporation, Koko decided it was high time for a well-earned breather to recalibrate her bearings. After her SAMC credit transfer came through, she lit out for an available safe-house compound on the Balearic Islands of the western Mediterranean to reflect on things. True, it was not the safest of locales, but the Portuguese and Spanish bird plagues had played out a few years before, and the largest of the islands, Majorca, where the safe house stood, was a speedy hover hop to the ceaseless, rankled jaws of North Africa for work if her credits wore thin.
Days of sipping warm wine, nibbling salty cheeses, and staring out at the deep-rig, sub-core mining platforms. Loafing in a king-sized bed and recharging her depleted faculties with soft drugs and anonymous, hard sex—it helped alleviate some of her discontentment, but still, it wasn’t enough. After a while, Koko thought that maybe what she really needed to refresh her depleted outlook was a heavy-handed dose of big-sister authoritarianism.
It wasn’t that Koko was overly sentimental or anything. She wasn’t. But she also realized that she didn’t have many real friends in her life. The pressures and responsibilities of her kind of livelihood sort of put the kibosh on those types of personal sentiments. She found herself thinking more and more about Portia Delacompte and their combat bonding.
She hadn’t heard from Delacompte in a while, and it dawned on Koko that perhaps Big D could infuse her with some direction. Delacompte’s confidence and zeal had always seemed to do the trick before, fired her right up and fixed her center. Maybe Delacompte could light the path for her. At the very least, she was sure her old friend wouldn’t spare her a good mental ass kicking.
Cue Koko the sleuth.
Sitting at a long table overlooking the Med in the safe house, she started calling in a bunch of favors with her contacts. Combed intelligence research sources for hours upon hours and stared into archival projection prompts until she felt she was losing her marbles. It seemed Delacompte had become a ghost. No matter where she looked or who she hammered with questions, no trace could be found of the woman. Koko had a sinking feeling that Delacompte had vanished from the Earth. After a week’s worth of frustration, Koko was about to forget the whole deal and take an assignment down in Cameroon, but then an old associate who ran geosynchronous tactical intercepts relayed in a patch to her that Delacompte had taken a top-secret executive position at a leisure finance firm up in Finland.
Koko packed her bags and was on a transport north two hours later. After half a day of banging around Helsinki and getting her bearings, she had a plan.
* * *
Like a wobbling hurled tomahawk, the fuselage of the hired helo sliced through the freezing sleet above Helsinki under
the cover of darkness. Gull-winged micro-fusion lift engines keened a tri-phonic, ear-splitting chime as Koko keyed her headset mic near her mouth.
“So, you’re a lousy pilot on top of being a crook?”
The pilot, a freelancer known only as Fredrikkaa, used her thick lips to work her cigarette to the other corner of her mouth and drew in some smoke. Her profile, puffy and red from drink, glowed creepily as the tip of her cigarette cherried. She mumbled something, but over the engine noise Koko couldn’t make out the words. Koko was familiar with a few key phrases in Finnish, especially operational commands and such, but she found herself coming up short on the profanity front.
The pilot didn’t bother using her own headset mic and shouted, “This building you want, this pilvenpiirtäjä? Defenses heavy!”
Koko keyed her mic again and gestured to the console. “I told you. The target is fortified on the lower levels, not on the roof. I’ve triple-checked the specs. Besides, this is a Eurofire Insert-40. What’re you worried about? The triangulum countermeasures on these birds come standard.”
The pilot swung the helo south-southeast, and they bounced across some chop.
“No-no,” the pilot replied. “I fly civil only. No weapons. This now a tourist birdy!”
Koko shook her head. Great. Whatever. Just get her close. That was all Koko needed and what she paid double for.
After studying the building, Koko had memorized Delacompte’s floor and unit number. Delacompte’s high-rise quarters were several floors below the structural outcrop on the roof that Koko planned to drop down on. With the crummy weather, she knew doing a staged rappel and climb-down would really heighten the surprise. Yeah, Koko thought, it’s going to be a hoot. Remind Big D of her good ol’ days.
Out the sleet-slicked forward canopy, Koko observed the pilvenpiirtäjä, the target building, approaching fast. She unbuckled her safety straps and moved aft to get into position. A moment later the pilot engaged the craft’s whisper drive and the engine racket softened as though the world around them had suddenly been swallowed whole. Using a single finger, the pilot pointed to the building and informed Koko via pantomime that they were one minute out.
Koko held up a clenched fist to demonstrate that she understood. She slipped on her harness, checked and clipped into the anchor hook above her head, and prepared herself. After pulling her deployment bag onto her shoulders, she gave the pilot a “go” signal and the cabin door chik-choked and slid wide. The cold wet wind gusted hard, and Koko saw they were directly above the roof. Koko threw out her nylon rappelling line to the rooftop below.
Koko stepped out onto the helo’s slippery landing skid. The sleet slashed her face and she pivoted one hundred eighty degrees, bracing her feet shoulder-width apart, keeping herself relaxed but steady on the skid. Heart beating hard, Koko looked down and saw the end of the rappelling line light up green, indicating the rope had made contact with the gravel on the building’s roof. Depth perception at their perilous height along with the weather and darkness was a mother, but having the guidance light hot on the line helped.
Out at a forty-five-degree angle, Koko gripped her brake hand on the line at the small of her back. In her head she recalled faint echoes of her trainers from years past. Go slow, brake, then descend. Do not go hard or you will die.
Koko slipped off into the darkness.
* * *
After releasing the line for her harness, Koko watched the Eurofire helo wheel off over the skyline and disappear. All that lay ahead for Koko now was a gymnastic scale down to Delacompte’s flat. Luckily for Koko, the building’s architectural design included great bulging bars on each unit’s terrace, presenting her with easy consecutive leaps of eight feet in between floors. Smiling with the anticipation of her upcoming surprise, Koko took her time and reveled in the physicality of her descent. A minute and a half later and she hit the final overhanging ledge above Delacompte’s unit. Slowly she lowered her feet until she was able to swing herself and softly, silently land on Delacompte’s balcony.
In front of Koko, two sliding nine-foot-high window doors glowed. Thick, mushroom-brown curtains were drawn nearly tight but a sliver of light escaped. Koko combed a hand through her wet hair and freed the small deployment bag from her shoulders. Yes, she thought, this dropping in all of a sudden might seem a mite rude, but Koko was positive they’d share more than a few hearty laughs over the stunt. Then she wondered if Delacompte was alone. Whoops. What if Delacompte was entertaining or, worse yet, what if she was scandalously indisposed? This could be a new chapter in Koko’s long list of embarrassing life screw-ups. Fuck it. Too late for second guesses now.
Behind the sliding glass windows, a vertical rift of light between the curtains beckoned. Koko took a tentative step and then another, but she froze when she heard a pained shriek inside.
What the hell?
Two quick steps forward and Koko cupped her hands to peer through the glass.
The scene inside hurled a pole of ice straight through her stomach. A well-appointed living room with blinding white features and furniture draped in transparent plastic tarps spread wide as if the room was set to be repainted. Delacompte, pallid-cheeked, sweaty and awkward on the floor with her legs in obstetric akimbo, a half-empty vodka bottle tipped to its side and leaking to her right, a vial of scattered pills nearby. Delacompte writhing, her face contorted in pain, hauling up something from within her, higher and higher to her wheezing breast. A deflated, smeary umbilical cord trailing.
No.
An appalling knot of expression on the infant’s face—shrieking.
NO!
Delacompte’s four trembling fingers and the thumb of her right hand pinching off and squeezing the baby’s neck.
Koko pounded on the glass and screamed. She lunged sideways for the handle on the terrace window, yanking hard and to the left, but found the sliding window’s mechanism locked. There was no time. None.
Koko launched herself shoulder-first through the glass.
Her crash ripped the curtains from the rod. Delacompte looked at her, her expression shorted out by shock, her groggy, blood-starved brain unable to assimilate the fact that Koko was actually there, rolling to her feet and moving. Koko spun sideways and kicked out with all her might, the toe of her right boot connecting with Delacompte’s open jaw. The impact instantly rendered Delacompte unconscious and threw off Koko’s equilibrium. Koko collapsed to the floor in a heap by Delacompte and her dead child.
The gravity of her friend’s desperate act lowered onto Koko, and with it a profound sorrow so new and so disturbing it felt as though her insides were imploding. Broken glass clinking beneath her, Koko lolled her head to the right and wiped the salty sting from her eyes. She found herself reaching out for the child, inert and facedown on the plastic.
Never in her life had Koko touched the skin of an infant, let alone a newborn. Never once in the collectives or even the de-civ warzones when she guarded hopeless refugees wailing from hunger and despair. The slippery softness on her fingertips shocked her and pulled the breath from her chest.
Five tiny, pebble-sized toes. A foot now in her fingers and a lifted leg revealing the cleft of the child’s sex.
Koko rolled wildly left and vomited. She puked for a full minute until it seemed nothing more would come forth and her throat felt as though it’d been flossed with frayed wire. Finally, when she stopped heaving, she rolled back and felt the grief and disbelief inside changing. The thick emotional calluses from a lifetime of warfare and capitalized catastrophe had vanished. A blizzard of symphonic confusion welled inside her, overwhelming her practiced discipline and control. Koko convulsed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
“What have you done?”
MISTAKES
Flynn’s face blanches.
“No…”
Koko shuts her eyes and wrestles against the surge of memories. She deflates heavily after a long intake and expulsion of air. “Yeah,” she says. “I should have just gotten the he
ll out of there, but I didn’t. I stayed.”
“But why?”
“What do you mean, why? I was traumatized, you dope. I was overwhelmed and confused. I mean, I’ve seen and done a lot in my life, Flynn, but never, ever something as bad as that.”
Flynn notices that Koko is shaking, so he reaches out and touches her shoulder.
“What did you do?”
Koko thumbs both of her eyes and blinks. “What did I do? I called out for a good, hot curry—the hell do you think I did? I found some heavy tranquilizers in her bathroom medicine cabinet and cleaned up everything.”
“By cleaning up everything you mean even the—”
“Yeah. The building’s thermite disposal flue. I kept Delacompte sedated and tied down in her bed for two full days until she came around. And you know what? That was the hardest part of the whole thing. Suffering her shame and the distress in her eyes. For a while she fought it, thinking I was some kind of hallucination, but I stayed with her and drew her out. When she realized I was there for real she confessed to me she couldn’t go through with it and forced a premature delivery. When I asked her why she didn’t terminate the pregnancy or why she waited so long, she made the worst and weakest of excuses. Stupid, horrible stuff. Work overload, procrastination, disbelief—she’d always been dutiful in her hygiene so it couldn’t possibly be true.
“I couldn’t accept it myself. I mean, this was a woman I’d always looked up to and measured myself against. It was all so pathetic. She said she considered it impossible. Thought she had a tumor or maybe a cancer, refusing on all fronts to accept the idea that she’d been pregnant. It made me sick. Fuck. She begged me, Flynn, begged me to understand the opportunities of her new world. She couldn’t have a baby. It would destroy everything she had worked so long and so hard for.”